St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Your Tech Weblog

St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Live Comcast TV on an iPad? This is coming soon, very soon

My wife has a tendency to hog the TV for marathon viewing sessions (“House” via Netflix DVDs is her current obsession).

I don’t complain (too much) because I have alternatives. My iPad is my alternate TV, and I can watch quite a lot on it.

I have our Comcast Xfinity cable-TV feed hooked up to the home iMac, so I can record shows with an EyeTV tuner and watch the resulting iTunes video files on my tablet.

There are nice video-streaming apps, as well, such a Netflix app (“Breaking Bad” is my current obsession), and a Comcast Xfinity TV app that gives me streaming access to scads of archived TV episodes and movies.

What Idon’t have, and crave, is live Xfinity TV on my iPad. Ah, but Comcast is about to remedy that little oversight.

It will accomplish this in an interesting way. A small device will be rented out to Comcast users and connected to their Wi-Fi networks. With their tablets also logged on to the Wi-Fi networks, live TV will stream from device (dubbed a “micro cable box”) to iPad.

Neato. There have been online rumors about this in recent days, and Comcast has confirmed it is coming to the Twin Cities before the end of the year.

Among users of the company’s popular iPad app, live TV has been the most-requested feature, the company told me.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to Comcast since it had expected users of the iPad app to use it mostly outside the home. The opposite turned out to be true: The vast majority of iPad-app user occurs at home, even with Comcast programming available via the residences’ HDTVs.

So adding a live-TV option makes a lot of sense — especially in households like mine. If a TV is in use by one family member, someone else can fire up the iPad. Everyone is happy.

Heck, the missus and I could be sitting side by side, yet watching different shows. (Yes, we will talk to each other, too.)

That’s not all Comcast has in store for its Twin Cities clientele. Its home-security and home-automation services, available elsewhere, will hit this metro area by the end of the year or early next year, I’m told.

This involve all kinds of interesting home add-ons, such as door sensors, security cameras, a replacement thermostat and a tablet-like control panel to rule ’em all. There’s even an Xfinity Home Security app on Apple’s App Store to turn an iOS device into a home controller (on-site or on the road).